The 50% y-o-y growth is the real headliner. While that sort of figure is not totally surprising, it’s still a Big Number. Consider: Normalize the 46-billion views in 2007 to a daily figure of 126,027,397 and then compare that to viewership on a typical cable network — a popular cable news program like O’Reilly draws around 1,000,000 viewers per night — and you begin to see the kind of mass-market that YouTube and its ilk are drawing.

As an aside, my favorite part of the report is a section titled “Google, Grouper, and Guba”. Yes, I just like saying those three words one after another. And yes, I know that’s childish.

Comments

I don’t want to be a wet blanket, but two things occurred to me on reading those stats: the first was that consulting firms have been over-estimating traffic patterns since Larry and Sergey were in kindergarten (okay, that wasn’t all that long ago), and the second was that most of the views we’re talking about are in the 1-minute to 5-minute range at most, so it isn’t really fair to compare them to people watching a TV program.

Hey Mathew — Leaving the hyperbolic tendencies of market analysts aside, I disagree.
I _rarely_ watch more than five minutes of a program serially. Instead, I watch clips online, wander in and out of rooms/lounges/airports where shows are playing, and so on. Eventually it may add up to an entire program, but then again, it very likely may not. Who has time to watch an entire program, complete with lulls, bad bits, etc.?
In other words, the clip-centric viewer model at YouTube et al., the one mentioned in this study, represents my viewing patterns much _more_ than does the traditional 30-minute model.
While I may be alone in this, I don’t think I am.

That may be true, Paul — but I think you are very muc an “edge case” in that sense. Even if they do it by time-shifting with their Tivos and DVRs and/or channel-surfing, I still get the sense that the vast majority of people watch TV shows all the way through. I suppose that may be changing though.